Disorient Express

Sean Penn congratulates himself on getting away with the 'Great Train Robbery'.

Emergency Contact and I had promised to take my nephew and niece to the zoo this past weekend. The weather was foul and we had to postpone, not that I thought that the kids would melt, it’s just those precious little prima donnas, the animals, are a guaranteed no-show if the conditions don’t exactly suit them and their freshly cleaned fur coats.

As a get out of gaol, we went to a model railway exhibition. Now there are lot of things to say about the type of people, sorry, middle aged men, who sequester themselves away in a shed and spend 20,000 man hours on a toy, but I’m sure you’ve heard them and I’m not going to get into it. (Some fascinating skin conditions though…)

I’ve only seen a couple of other model train exhibition in my life so I confess that I’m no expert, but I think I have detected a couple of fashion changes in the ‘art form’.

First of all, no cultural cringe, and neither there should be, Australia has some great train trips. There were a couple of European dioramas, but all the rest were Australian and they really had the feel down pat.

They also don’t build the whole thing anymore. I remember that you used to look down on a big plank and you were supposed to appreciate the whole thing. Now, apart from a couple of models, you look at a framed section of the display and the models pass through it (usually to circle around the back on bare masonite) like a 3D moving painting.

One display had a nice piece of surreal absurdity in it. When you looked carefully at the beach scene, there was a sign in HO scale that declared “72 Remote Control Battle Group” with little model humans playing with there tiny little remote control battle ships beside the model railway.

It should be noted that the owners of even the most accurate and blindingly detailed displays, knew how to charm half the punters. In more than one display, in among all the historically spot-on mining towns and shunting yards, Thomas the Tank Engine would come steaming out of a tunnel and the kids would be rapt.